Godzilla Remake Director Promises A Realistic Tone

If you're a fan of a certain franchise or character, one of the most dreaded phases you can hear is "gritty reboot." It feels like it's only been since The Dark Knight that everyone wanted to make darker, more realistic versions of fantastical stories, but surely it was happening before then-- in order to get attention for simply recycling an existing character, directors and producers promise to make it "gritty" and "truthful," and half the time don't even follow through on that.

But sometimes the gritty reboot is exactly what a character needs, and it's hard to imagine something better for it than Godzilla, the famous Japanese monster born of nuclear war who was last seen stomping around a glossy New York City in Roland Emmerich's 1998 version. At Comic Con this year Legendary Pictures announced a new Godzilla with a well-received teaser, which lifted the "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" from none other than the atomic bomb's creator, Robert Oppenheimer. The remake will be directed by Gareth Edwards, who previously made the low-budget monster movie Monsters, and Edwards is promising a little bit of that small-scale authenticity in his Godzilla as he explained to Total Film (via The Geek Files:

I've always been interested in Godzilla and the ideas around him. I really wanted to see another Godzilla film and jumped at the opportunity. My main idea was to imagine 'If this really happened, what would it be like?' I want to take a grounded, realistic approach to a Godzilla film."

Say what you will about promising a giant lizard movie would be realistic, but Edwards proved with Monsters he could make a genre movie low-to-the-ground and character-based, and it's exciting to hunk of how he might do it on a larger budget too. The new Godzilla movie is set for release May 16; are you as enthusiastic about it as we are?